Large consumer goods company leverages Patni’s application management services to significantly lower support cost and improve response time by more than 50 percent

The Client
The client is a leading multinational manufacturer of consumer products, which includes a portfolio of world-class brands. It has multiple manufacturing facilities across the globe and markets its brands through multiple channels in over 200 countries.

The Challenge
The client uses more than 30 IT applications to meet its various business needs. Primary amongst them at a transaction level are SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Manugistics, Mapics, JD Edwards and Mfg-Pro. The complex integration of these systems and timely completion of data interfaces and schedules is critical to the business as it is necessary for sales analysis (revenue and key performance indicators), trade discounts, promotions, and financial consolidation and reporting.

A team comprising in-house IT personnel and experienced external contractors supported most of these applications. The client also established a datacenter to identify the team that would rectify issues and resolve user requirements. However, the client has varying support processes for each of the continents where it has a presence. While tools like telephone and email handled a bulk of the calls not all were routed through the datacenter. This meant that the in-house IT team had to expend considerable effort in supporting the various applications.

The client wanted to effectively leverage the power of IT to maintain its competitive edge. It, therefore, wanted to provide its in-house IT team the bandwidth necessary to focus on more strategic issues including the creation of a strategic IT roadmap for the organization. This necessitated the need to outsource on-going application service-support to a strategic IT partner with the requisite skills and expertise. Through this initiative the client planned to:

• Reduce support costs over time
• Improve response time for resolution of end user issues / concerns
• Reduce failures that occur on various batch jobs. In the existing scenario, these failures caused down-stream failures resulting in the non-availability of the system to the end-users.
• Ensure data consistency across the applications being supported
• Free up internal resources for more strategic work
• Create Subject Matter Experts (SME) within existing teams
• Harmonize support process across all applications
• Improve performance reporting capabilities.

The Solution
Patni was already involved in providing support to the client’s warehouse systems. This gave Patni a ringside view of user requirements in terms of response time, level of support, and also common user problems. Using this knowledge, Patni analyzed user requirements for supporting all other applications and worked closely with the client to identify the level of support required for each application.

Patni proposed implementing a global delivery model to achieve the key objective of reduced support cost. Patni introduced a number of best practices into the support model in order to provide end users a process that was easy-to-use and provided significantly improved response times for issue resolution. This included best practices in the areas of process and incidence management, managing development requests and overall project management practices. Process Management included Root Cause Analysis, Early warning systems, Graphical Evaluation and Review Techniques, and SLA-based end-to-end process management. In addition to this, Patni suggested process changes and application fixes for modules and application components facing frequent failures, and put in place processes to verify improvement effected by this change.

Patni also identified additional training requirements for staff manning the support centers and the client’s user community. As a result of superior service delivery, the client allowed Patni to take over systems that were not previously considered a part of this support project.

The Benefits
The robust processes that Patni brought to the project enabled the client to smoothly transition various systems into the integrated support model. In addition to this, key business benefits obtained by the client include:

• Accurate and on-time data availability across all applications 100% of the time
• Reduction in average response time by more than 50% during the first 6 months
• Decrease in incident volumes by more than 25% within 3 months of steady state
• Reduction in age of incidents by more than 30%, with no cases aging beyond 1 month from the time of opening
• Release of critical client resources (Subject Matter Experts) much earlier than planned translating into savings of more than US $250K per year as direct resource costs.
• Updated documentation for all processes.